Quote:
Originally Posted by Richardr
It is ultimately a question of whether a channel is likely to add or at least retain TV customers, in which case Virgin Media will do a deal, in some cases paying the channel if it is thought to be attractive. On the other hand, if a channel isn't attractive then they will either not add it or will charge it a decent sum.
Don't forget that the free to air channels on Sky satellite, Freesat, or Freeview pay Sky / Freesat / Freeview a relatively small fee to be on their EPG, but also have to pay broadcast costs to the owner of the capacity they broadcast on whether a transponder or a multiplex for terrestrial, and there are additional costs to that, e.g uplink, etc.
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In a small number of cases Virgin Media is compelled to pay carriage fees for mandatory content, e.g. Discovery, Sky Sports. And the content owner insists that these are bundled, so VM must carry Animal Planet even though nobody watches it.
Below this top tier is the mid-tier like Gold and MTV where small payments may be made by either side. And then the lowest tier like the aforementioned Rewind TV must pay VM a lot, including at the central headend encoding, metadata, distribution and QA. When you add in an EPG slot and platform integration, it amounts to an unaffordable price which means the channel either isn't on VM or drops out if it is.
And in case you're wondering why a small channel might be on Freeview and/or Sky, the reason is that only VM does all the heavy processing like encoding I referred to and so charges more.